Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Basics * Short explanation: Bitcoin clone, internet money. * Longer explanation: Bitcoin Cash was born from a rift in the Bitcoin community over how to scale the network. Those who believed that the Bitcoin block size should be increased split off to create Bitcoin Cash. Each block is 8MB instead of Bitcoin’s 1MB, so BCH can handle up to 60 transactions per second compared to BTC’s 7. Here’s a deeper explanation of the fork and why it occurred. * Current issues: Bitcoin Cash and its creators have been in an endless quest to prove the legitimacy of BCH over BTC, which has resulted in them being involved in some potentially shady activity. The network appears to be far more centralised than Bitcoin, and infighting between the lead developers and marketers plagues the brand. BCH sees itself as the ‘true bitcoin’, but lags far behind the original in average users and transaction volume. * Sometimes BCC or XBC but BCH is the most known ticker. "Viabtc is famed as a major supporter of bigger blocks and in 2016 mined the first Bitcoin Unlimited block. It also proposed the name for Bitcoin Cash." Background * Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork created during the controversial scaling debate. It decided to tackle the scaling problem in a different and more immediate way to Bitcoin by increasing the size of its blocks (the pages in the banking analogy) from 1MB to 8MB which doesn’t do anything to speed up transactions but reduces backlogs while retaining security. In order to adapt itself to the large change in computing power experienced over the first few weeks it implemented an emergency difficulty adjustment which allows it to change the block difficulty much more quickly than Bitcoin. * At the “Future of Bitcoin” conference a developer named Amaury Séchet revealed the Bitcoin ABC” (Adjustable Blocksize Cap) project and told the audience about the upcoming UAHF. * Following Séchet’s announcement and after Bitcoin ABC’s first client release, the project “Bitcoin Cash” (BCC) was announced. Bitcoin Cash will be pretty much the same as BTC minus a few things, like the Segregated Witness (Segwit) implementation and the Replace-by-Fee (RBF) feature. According to BCC, a few of the biggest differences between BTC and BCC will be three new additions to the bitcoin codebase that include; Tech * Block Size Limit Increase – Bitcoin Cash provides an immediate increase of the block size limit to 8MB. * Replay and Wipeout Protection – Should two chains persist, Bitcoin Cash minimizes user disruption, and permits safe and peaceful coexistence of the two chains, with replay and wipeout protection. * New Transaction Type – As part of the replay protection technology, Bitcoin Cash introduces a new transaction type with additional benefits such as input value signing for improved hardware wallet security, and elimination of the quadratic hashing problem. Avalanche * The Avalanche pre-consensus has been applied (10-2-2019) on BCHD. On the BCH chain, Avalanche is only being used for pre-consensus and runs parallel with the original proof-of-work consensus mechanism (On Avalanche (AVA) it is used in a PoS system). Instant transactions / double spend proofs * Tom Zander revealed (30-8-2019) the double-spend proof (DSP) scheme for the BCH implementation Flowee the Hub. * From this (3-9-2019) Bitcoin.com article: "Software developer Awemany has published a potential alternative approach to instant transactions on the Bitcoin Cash network called “delta blocks” or Storm. Awemany’s paper notes that there are some similarities to his idea to Ethereum’s ghost and uncle system. Storm is still far from being ready, the developer stressed, but he believes the code and simulation show the approach is “viable in principle for instant confirmations and that it is in some ways superior to discussed alternatives.”" Smart Contracts * Is now also supporting tokens through the Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP). * Is working on Smart Contract possibilities through Nimbus * On if Maker would be possible on BCH. From this Bitcoin.com article (2-12-2019): “Building a decentralized stablecoin like protocol like Maker DAO on Bitcoin Cash would be very complicated but with the right tools and support it shouldn’t be much more difficult than building it on Ethereum.” However, Ruck again underlines the need for a couple of changes to the Bitcoin Cash transaction format for the stablecoin smart contract concept to work on the BCH chain. The main changes would be merklized script trees, cashassembly, and a preamble. Additionally, Ruck says you could add fractional satoshis and a malleability fix as well as Schnorr signature functionality. The developer also researched a time estimation or how long it would take to implement a project like the Maker DAO on BCH. “The sum would be around 248 days and the total cost around $297,600,” the software engineer suggests." Scripting * Scripting is possible on BCH. Or as Rhett put it (26-11-2019): "With BITBOX and CashScript, BitcoinCash FINALLY has the scripting environment on Bitcoin that I hoped for in Bitcoin since the beginning. For YEARS Bitcoin Scripting was blocked due to transaction malleability and Block Size issues. This is a HUGE DEAL most are overlooking." = Clients * The BCH network has as of 1-2019 nine different full node clients to chose from. Bitprim, Parity, Bcash, Copernicus, Bitcoin Verde, Flowee and BCHD are some of these. * At the time of writing (3-2019), BU is the second most popular BCH node implementation capturing 44 percent of the 1,518 public nodes. Bitcoin ABC has about 54.4 percent of the public BCH nodes with 826 according to Coin Dance statistics. The smaller implementations Bchd, Flowee, Bitprim, and XT have no more than 10 nodes per client. Update: as of 27-1-2020 BU has 51% an ABC 46%, however, the more important info is that all the other clients have still failed to capture any real stake. Bitcoin Cash hard forks * A map of the main consensus forks (2009-2019) of Bitcoin can be found here (11-2019). * After splitting off from BTC on 2017-08-01 the BCH network had the following forks: 2017-11-13: DAA Change (Hard Fork) 2018-05-15: Monolith (Hard Fork) 32MB limit, old opcodes 2018-11-15: Magnatix Anomaly (Hard Fork) OP_CHECKDATASIG, CTOR. This hard fork was contentious with a minority and created Bitcoin SV (to see the further hard forks on BSV check their page, or view this map. 2019-05-15: Great Wall (Hard Fork) Schnorr Signatures 2019-05-15: Graviton (Hard Fork) Schnorr for multisig Devs, partnerships, teams, etc. * Bitcoin Cash has support from various members of the cryptocurrency industry including miners, like Bitmain, exchanges, and clients like Bitcoin ABC, Unlimited, and Classic will also be assisting the project. Roger Ver is also a well known advocate for the project. Known Developers * Andrea Suisani, dev * Amaury Séchet, dev Bitcoin ABC * Chris Pacia, dev BCHD * Mark Lundeberg, Independent BCH Developer * Jason Cox, dev Bitcoin ABC * Antony Zegers, dev Bitcoin ABC and helps with coordinating the BCH protocol. * Gabriel Cardona; BCH developer and Bitbox founder * Tyler Smith; BCHD BCH Latam * The old CEO of the Dash Latam, George Donnelly, claimed in an interview (10-11-2019) he would take the Dash Latam team away from Dash and focus on BCH now with his new project called Prosuni. This break brought quite some heated discussions on the surface, most claiming George didn't do what he claimed he did, and that his results were sub-par. Update (7-2-2020): Donnelly has now launched BCH Latam. * Soon after they launched their own SLP token; the PAN token. They sold (7-2-2020) 1700 of the 180000 tokens in the first 2 days. "token is there to fund the execution of its ambitious project of spreading BCH awareness through Latin America. The proposal includes development of the Panmoni app, a comprehensive ecosystem. It will include the function of sending remittances and also a rewards program for cryptocurrency enthusiasts who onboard businesses and promote adoption in other ways." Investments * Is one of the investments chosen by Grayscale, owned by DCG (Grayscale also owns 1% of the BTC supply) * Bitmain funds some development (Bitcoin ABC) for BCH * Bitcoin.com markets it heavily. Roger Ver announced (20-11-2019) a $200M BCH Ecosystem Fund. The fund will invest in and incubate businesses like payment gateways, processors remittances, wallet and merchant acquirers. The Infrastructure Funding Plan for Bitcoin Cash (IFP) * On 22-1-2020 an Infrastructure Funding Proposal was announced by Jiang Zhuoer, with backing of Antpool, ViaBTC, Bitcoin.com. This proposal sparked heavy debate in the BCH community and a cascade of suggestions and critique on how the fund should look like followed. A timeline of the events (as of 7-2-2020) from CoinSpice is as follows: * 01222020 Infrastructure Funding Proposal * 01222020 BCH devs react * 01232020 Jiang Zhuoer AMA * 01232020 Amaury Séchet addendum to IFP * 01242020 Bitcoin.com releases statement in support of IFP * 01242020 Jonald Fyookball’s position on the IFP * 01252020 Justin Bons, Tobias Ruck suggest voting on IFP * 01252020 Antony Zegers support of IFP * 01262020 Early market reaction to IFP * 01262020 Anon dev imaginary_username’s reaction to IFP * 01262020 Peter Rizun’s reaction to IFP * 01272020 Opposing Miners Group * 01272020 BUIP143: Refuse the Coinbase Tax * 01282020 Bitcoin Verde’s reaction to IFP * 01282020 Bitcoin.com drops support for IFP * 01282020 BCHD’s reaction to IFP * 02312020 Zhuoer’s BCH Miner Donation Plan Update * 02032020 Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, Zcash’s Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn react to IFP Category:Coins/Tokens